ProgBlog

The Guardian newspaper occasionally includes a reference to prog - I suspect a couple of the writers are closet fans - but I was surprised when an edition earlier this month had two references: an article about Kate Bush and another about how rock musicians shouldn't have dabbled with disco...

By ProgBlog, Jan 17 2016 07:56PM

I’ve barely touched upon the fourth music playback format, cassette tape (and I’m not going to mention the short-lived 8 track!) but guest blogger Richard Page hinted at this, a time before CDs when the domination of vinyl was slipping. The compact cassette was immensely portable, sparking the invention of the Sony Walkman and hundreds of imitations and allowing drivers to choose their own music rather than being subjected to a limited range of radio stations with their playlists of narrow choice. During the period, the mid 80s, I was attempting to get enough money together to get a mortgage so I did extra work for the Anthony Nolan laboratories, then based at St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington, and took my wife’s genuine Sony Walkman to listen to music of my choice while I sat at a microscope and read HLA typing plates.

Driving off to Crystal Palace National Sports Centre to play squash last weekend with a CD I’d burned of the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii soundtrack, I realised my current car has a radio and a USB port but no CD player. Since learning to drive relatively late in life at the age of 26, my wife and I have got through a number of automobiles, buying new or with delivery mileage and simply budgeting to keep each for an average of three years before selling them on. Our first car bought together was a 1986 Ford Fiesta that only had a radio. The husband of a work colleague who worked in a car audio shop fitted a (high end) removable radio cassette player that lasted into the next car, a new shaped Fiesta with a joystick device that allowed you to pan around the speakers embedded in the upholstery. I normally took public transport to get to work but used the car for on call and later, to drive to Brunel University every couple of weeks when I was doing my part time MSc in Applied Immunology. I’d got hold of Mainstream (1975) by Quiet Sun, the eponymous GTR album (1986) and Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), all on vinyl and taped them specifically for the journeys between Croydon and Uxbridge. Mainstream is an incredible album that seems to have missed out on the big time; mainstream it is not and for further discussions see my blog post http://progblog.co.uk/the-blogs/4583484660/Mainstream-(originally-posted-3-3-14)/7811326.The sound on GTR has dated but I still like the songs, even though this isn't really prog whereas Momentary Lapse is prog, cinematic, daring and true to the spirit of early-mid 70s Floyd.

The final days of my relationship with cassette tape unravelled on an out of hours car journey to work, just outside Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park football ground when I was playing Trey Gunn’s The Third Star (1996). I’d bought the CD for my brother Tony and he repaid the favour by sending me a tape which decided to fade away to silence in the player even though it had been recorded on what was considered to be a decent quality Maxell C90. At this stage I had sold off my original Technics deck that had served me for the last year at university, through the damp of a sequence of basement flats and the rigours of an on-stage appearance as the sound source for three gigs I played in 1984. It’s strange how cyclical fashion can be. That silver-finished piece of hi-fi, originally chosen for its beautifully damped ejection mechanism and the ability to cope with ‘metal’ tapes, was replaced by a Technics RS B106 cassette deck, finished in black, in the late 80s; my new system is largely silver. I also bought myself a high-end Aiwa walkman-like player and two hefty miniature HD speakers from a mall in Saudi Arabia when I was seconded to Jeddah for six weeks in 1992 so that I didn’t get prog-withdrawal. I bought the double cassette Yes anthology Yes Story (1992) from the same store and picked up some locally compiled tapes from elsewhere in the souk, including a best of early Marillion that was frequently aired in the hire-car (christened ‘the mobile lecture theatre’ for its outrageous size) that had been made available to my colleague, Consultant transplant surgeon Geoff Koffman.

Technics RS B106 cassette deck

I never owned many pre-recorded cassettes though the bargain bin of the Tooting branch of Woolworth allowed me to expand my music collection with some more obscure prog and jazz: TONTOs Expanding Headband’s Zero Time (1971) and Neil Ardley’s Kaleidoscope of Rainbows (1976) plus some of the more usual fare (McDonald and Giles, Steve Hackett, Caravan, Colosseum II, Greenslade) for knock down prices. There was even a stage where I owned more Gentle Giant on cassette than I did on any other format. To a greater extent my tape collection comprised albums recorded from vinyl lent to me by friends and family. Preferred manufacturers were TDK, BASF and Maxell and I tried to buy a quality above the basic, like the TDK AD. I was also happy to put together what would later be called ‘mix tapes’ for others, including recordings for a couple of women students at Goldsmiths’, Sue Aspinall who was into classic prog and Jo Dziuba who was more interested in Afterglow type Genesis.

There aren’t many albums that I home-recorded that I haven’t subsequently bought on another format. One that didn’t make it into my collection was Ian Anderson’s Walk into Light (1983) lent to me by my friend Jim – we were big Tull fans at the time – but I thought the material rather sub-standard and my recording was discarded years ago. Other albums took a considerable time for me to own, sometimes through lack of availability: I eventually got Bruford’s One of a Kind (1979) when Winterfold Records started up in 2005, having only had access to a taped copy for 25 years and bought The Third Star from Red Eye Records in Sydney in 2012, the first time I’d seen it in a shop since buying it for Tony. One of the very few albums that I taped but never bought myself is psychedelic masterpiece Mass in F Minor by The Electric Prunes (1968). The original disc belonged to Tony and my cassette recording dated from the late 70s. Like with most of my tapes, in an exercise to preserve the music, I burned this to CD when home-burning software became standard on PCs. I now have the album transferred to my mp3 player.

Warning notices that ‘home taping is killing music’ appeared on the inner sleeves of LPs in the mid 80s to be ignored by everyone. I’ve thought about this and, though I understand that it reduces royalty payments to artists, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a deep irony in record companies putting out a statement like that when it’s unscrupulous managers and the labels themselves that have controlled the income of musicians. What is really killing music is the trend towards conformity, the predictability of manufactured product and insidious influence. This may make merged global entertainment businesses attractive to shareholders but it makes for a less diverse musical scene; the requirement for financial control stifles creativity. In the end the message boils down to ‘home taping is reducing shareholder dividend.’

Home taping is killing music. I don't think so

A more recent example would be the issues over illegal downloads where control over output was ceded to the consumer and the cry from the labels was the same. Then Apple plonks a largely unwanted U2 album onto the devices of everyone with their iTunes software...

Home taping didn’t harm progressive rock and prog itself has prospered in recent years through the adaptation of alternative business models where the artists retain the copyright to their material and funding for new ventures is independent of the majors. The pound, euro and dollar of the fan go to the artists through crowdsourcing and album sales, with multiple platforms available to promote and provide examples of music. Let’s hope that home taping went some way to help kill off the old way of doing music business.

By ProgBlog, Dec 27 2015 11:05PM

I was very fortunate to receive a good collection of prog this Christmas. I try to help family members with a wish list but even better, my wife, who has a history of buying prog for my birthdays and Christmases, gets progressive rock-related suggestions from Amazon. One present I wasn’t expecting was the Steve Hackett: The Man, The Music DVD (Wienerworld, 2015) which is an up-to-date documentary that includes material relating to Wolflight and ends with a dedication to Chris Squire who was interviewed for the release. It also boasts a design that dovetails with that for Hackett’s Genesis Revisited: Live at Hammersmith box set (InsideOut Music, 2013.) Filmed and directed by Matt Groom it includes some insights into the early Hackett family life but the parts that will be of most interest to fans are those that relate to the Genesis period and the subsequent solo (Hackett band) material. The man himself comes across as very thoughtful and very polite when he comes to discuss his former colleagues in Genesis. It may be that those interviews were conducted before the shoddy treatment he received at the hands of the Genesis: Together and Apart documentary aired in October 2014. Keyboard player Roger King features quite heavily because of the value of his long-term musical and production contributions and there are other cameos from brother John Hackett, drummer Gary O’Toole, wind player Rob Townsend, guitarist Amanda Lehmann and inimitable bassist Nick Beggs. There are also discussions between Hackett and Steven Wilson and Hackett and Chris Squire. Footage from a concert at Leamington Spa is very well recorded and it would be interesting to know if there was sufficient material from that gig for a full DVD release.

I was listening to Nursery Cryme (1971) on my commute to and from work one day last week and was surprised to hear For Absent Friends, thinking that I’d not included it when I transferred the album to my mp3 player. Described by Hackett in the DVD as one of his first contributions to the group, I find the song a little throwaway. Hackett confirmed what I’ve always suspected, that Phil Collins featured on vocals on this track though when I won tickets from Capital Radio to see Genesis for their Three Sides Live Tour, the question was “what is the Genesis track where Phil Collins first sings solo?” I answered, on a homemade postcard, More Fool Me from Selling England by the Pound (1973) which has the sleeve declaration “(Vocals Phil)”. As I put the postcard in the post box I did wonder if it was a trick question so getting the ‘congratulations!’ letter came as a total surprise. Overall, The Man, The Music is a well balanced piece of work covering all of Hackett’s output, his personal thoughts, his guitar technique and with some interesting input from collaborators and family. I’d recommend it for any Hackett fan.

Congratulations letter from Capital Radio

My wife also got me David Bedford’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1975), a CD that had been on my wish list for some time. I bought a copy of Bedford’s Star Clusters, Nebulae & Places in Devon / The Song of the White Horse (1983) on vinyl from a record fair earlier this year which I really like, having previously dug out a YouTube video of the fascinating Omnibus documentary about the commission and making of White Horse. I bought a copy of Höstsonaten’s live performance of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (2013) from Fabio Zuffanti’s stall at the Prog Résiste festival in 2014, which included a DVD of the show from December 2012. That release epitomises Italian progressive rock with its brilliant musicianship and operatic scope and it rekindled my admiration for Coleridge’s poetry; when I was an undergraduate I used to own a copy of Coleridge’s complete works that I lent to an English student who never returned the book. I thought that the David Bedford version, from over 35 years earlier and narrated by actor Robert Powell, would make an interesting comparison. White Horse is truly organic, utilising the blowing stone in the instrumentation and describing a landscape; comparisons with Mike Oldfield’s sublime Bedford-orchestrated Hergest Ridge (1974) seem quite appropriate, whereas I find Ancient Mariner closer in structure to The Odyssey (1976) with less reliance on atonality and dissonance and more on recognisable melody, created with multiple keyboard lines. Having said that, there’s a highly evocative sparse percussive section where the ship is ice bound and it sounds like lanterns and sundry deck equipment is moving in the wind.

It’s interesting that Powell’s narration isn’t a recital of the poem; rather it conforms to what Bedford set out in the sleeve notes for the album, wanting to evoke the mood and atmosphere of certain passages, an effect achieved by using the notes from the margin of the poem. One of these, “No twilight within the courts of the sun” became a track by Steven Wilson on his first full-length solo album Insurgents (2008). I really like Ancient Mariner.

Another present that I’d not accessed before is Beyond and Before - the formative years of Yes by Peter Banks with Billy James (Golden Treasures Publishing, 2001.) Banks (born Brockbanks) died in 2013 and appeared on the first two Yes albums before forming his own band Flash. His style of playing was unique and he’s remembered as being a better guitarist than he was originally regarded. Flash weren’t really prog so I didn’t follow them particularly closely though it was hard to miss their albums in record stores. Banks himself has not really featured in much of the general discussion of the genre despite his excellent guitar work with Yes so this publication can be regarded as going some way to correct that omission. The book suffers from repetition, an excess of exclamations and some poor grammar but it’s gratifying to see very little bitterness in someone who wasn’t necessarily treated as well as they deserved; there aren’t many people he doesn’t like. He reflects upon material on which he performed and though he may have not been pleased with the recorded results at the time, he reassesses the music and generally now appreciates how it has turned out. It may not be deeply analytical but it’s easy and pleasurable to read.

Beyond and Before

Cactus Choir (1976) by Dave Greenslade is another album I’ve had on my radar for some time. Recorded not long after the break-up of Greenslade, the production is much cleaner than his previous band efforts but overall it’s less proggy and more bluesy and, in my opinion, less clever. I really liked the dynamic between Dave Greenslade and Dave Lawson and I liked Lawson’s lyrics. Early Greenslade may have sounded a little raw but there seemed to be a very good understanding between the four members. Simon Phillips isn’t a bad replacement for Andrew McCulloch and Tony Reeves features on half the tracks but the vocals are disappointing, with Steve Gould sounding like Elton John on the title track. For me, only Finale reaches the standard of the old band but it’s by no means a terrible effort.

With a remastered copy of GTR (2015), another Steve Hackett connection, Solaris’ Martian Chronicles II (2014) and, from my brother Richard Progeny: Seven Shows from Seventy Two this has been a good Christmas. I really appreciate all my other presents but the prog-related gifts have been exceptional.